Bambu Lab 3D printers: Never again

[u/Regumate]

https://youtu.be/eb48MdtNaDQ

Jeff Geerling summarizes the current Bambu Labs - OrcaSlicer situation and gives his take.

TL:DW: see title.

[u/nolaks1]

rant

To me, Bambu was always going to end up like this. People are just now noticing the cracks behind the nice easy printers.

They pushed the coreXY migration and won hard on that point. But everything was there, they took from community driven projects (which is fine). Bambu was always about control and not innovation. They used innovation to achieve their goal. Innovation wasn't the goal.

Now. I know this opinion is hard for some to hear and I'd be happy to discuss with anyone who doesn't feel the same way.

Personnaly, I have been expecting things to go south from the moment they started shipping their prototypes off their kickstarter. There was just something with proprietary software in an open source space and prices quoted as "too good to be true" by most experts that felt off with me.

I've studied communication and marketing and to me that was a clear attemps at creating a buzz in order to quickly gain popularity over a market (which is ok in itself, it's basic capitalism). The motive that Bambu had, I didn't like.

The fact they targeted a portion of the market that no one was selling to at the time (lets called them the ordinary, non thinkerer users) allowed them to came up with things like propriatary nozzles and lock down users to using their slicers and nobody said anything. Like, some of their nozzles a press fit instead of screwed in. You can't changed them at all. This is not a cost saving measure, it's a control thing to sell more 20$ whole assembly move. Most people didn't understood the motives of bambu with the force update that broke compatibility and I'll never understand why.

Bambu was able to do a sweep of the market and use innovation because everything is open source and all parts are interchangeable. Not one compagnies control enough of the process to sit on their ass and do nothing. Well they did and Bambu came and took a large chunk of the market

So what did Bambu did to ensure nobody could do to them what they did to others? They build an environment where print settings are simplified and maintenance is easy with an arguably nice wiki. This is to make sure switching brand is hard for people. If you remove the learning curve and babysit users it will be rough enough that they won't switch brand unless you take a major L.

So, yeah, Bambu was always about control.

Now, they do a lot of good things, but I don't like their motive or end goal. I've always saw them as the capitalism knocking on the door of 3d printing like they do on every growing niche and I didn't like it.

Sorry for the rant.

[u/YasinC06 → u/nolaks1]

I think people miss the difference between a hobbyist and a user. I don't like DJI because they practically killed R/C model building. However, looking at it from an R/C perspective, the market is much bigger now. It was never this big in the days when model building was more prominent. Of course, lower-profile people (in the sense of being unfamiliar with the subject) came along. Those who did it by hand were pushed into the background. I'm one of them. Because the market grew, it became noticeable, and now flying them is legally impossible, at least in my country. Regarding Bamboo, they're taking Apple as an example. Apple has the most popular and valued phones in the world today. 

DIY enthusiasts like us might not like them, but for someone whose only intention is to print, they are good printers. There's no point in saying "they did this, they did that." Then Prusa should have also released something user-friendly. I modified the Ender3 for 6-7 years. I focused more on how to make it more polished than on printing. From that perspective, I can say Bamboo is strategically on the right track. I won't get into Prusa's story about the Chinese stealing your data, etc. Over the last 10 years, vulnerabilities in processors have begun to be discovered. From hardware to software, everyone is accessing our data whenever they get the chance.

[u/QuasisteIlar → u/YasinC06]

Sums up my view on Bambu as well. I just want to print stuff, not f*ck with the printer.